What to do if a teacher can't make it to a conference

There will always be occasions when a teacher cannot attend your conference - often at the last moment, due to illness, personal circumstances, etc. 

Meet the Teacher has a number of ways to deal with this, depending on what the school wants to do with that teacher's appointments:

• Change the teacher taking the appointments
• Cancel the appointments and notify the parents
• Move that teacher's appointments to a new date
  
  

A. To change the teacher taking the appointments

If you simply want to substitute another member of staff to take the appointments please follow this guide: Amending Teachers on an Existing Appointment.

B. To cancel the appointments and notify the parents

1. Take a copy of the appointments in case you need to refer later to a record of who had booked with the teacher.
2. In Configure Conference > Teacher Availability find the teacher in question and click the Change Times link below their name.
3. In the box that appears use the Mark this teacher as unavailable for appointments switch
4. You are then asked if you want to show a reason for the unavailability to parents who try to book that teacher. This is optional and can be left blank if you wish.
   
5. Click Save.
6. Make any other changes you need on the Teacher Availability page, then click Save at the foot of the page to save the conference overall.
7. At this point you will be notified of appointments affected by the changes you have made and given the choice to remove them and email the parents, or keep them.
8. If you choose to remove them you can add a message to those parents if wished. Then either confirm the deletion, or cancel it by keeping the appointments.

C. To move the appointments to a new date

If this teacher is the only teacher involved on a particular date you can simply change that date in Configure conference > Basic Details. See this guide: Changing the date of an conference. However, note that this keeps the appointments at the same times as they were on the old date and parents may not be available at those times on the new date.

If the teacher is not the only teacher on the date you will need to: 

1. Add a new date to the conference in Configure Conference > Basic Details (or create a completely new conference specifically for that teacher).
2. Use Configure Conference > Class Teachers to have only the teacher in question involved on that new date (or Configure Conference > Students if you have created a new conference).
   
3. Cancel the existing appointments and notify the affected parents as in section B above - using the optional note that can be added to the emailed notification to ask the parents to log in and re-book their appointments with the teacher on the new date.